“I’m thirty-two! Not so young. My first marriage was to Eduardo, my dance instructor, when I was twenty-one. It lasted a week. My second was to my girlfriend, Jenna, when I was twenty-three, and I doubled my record because it lasted two weeks. We were drunk in San Francisco the entire marriage. When we sobered up, we realized we’d made an oopsie and had it annulled. The last was Sol, which was good for a couple of years, but then his father died and he fell apart and yada yada.” She stood from the park bench and fanned her face with her purse to ward off the heat. The lemonade had made it bearable for a time, but they were back to the dark days of humid volcanoes. “I’m heading back to The Diamond before I melt.”
“Good idea. I don’t want Alex calling in a missing persons report on us. He’s a little too by the books sometimes.”
“Sometimes? If you shoved a lump of coal up his ass you’d get a diamond.”
Darren barked laughter. Maddy grinned, pulling out her vaporizer and taking another drag as she circled Davy Crockett to get to the sidewalk. “Honestly, he’d just assume I’d dragged you back to my she-den to violate you. Worst-case scenario, he’d hose you off with Purell and pray a lot.”
“Not sure what he’d be praying for. If I’m in your she-den, I went there voluntarily. One benefit to being six and a half feet tall is no one drags me anywhere.”
Maddy stopped and tilted back her head to peer at his face parts and everything else oh so good about his outsides. The part of her that liked to play games—the power play, the top to the bottom, and you’d better behave—was intrigued by the prospect of taking him on as a fuckpet. The realist said that he’d have to give himself over to it completely and utterly or his size could skew the dynamic.
It’s hard to manhandle someone who can throw you across the room like a javelin if he so chose.
Which I’d probably let him do because, good God, he’s gorgeous.
She wasn’t usually up for being topped, but when one is presented with a perfect piece of steak, one eats the steak one’s given, however it’s served, without complaint.
But don’t make assumptions. The exterior does not always equate to what the interior needs or yearns for.
“You must be fantastic at decorating the tree at Christmastime,” she said. “A bit like the Abominable Snowman from Rudolph, only you have great teeth and slightly less body hair.”
“Oh, I am. Mama has me put the angel on every year and then proceeds to nag me for an hour while I straighten it just so.”
“Good woman, knowing what she wants.”
“Her and my sister both. They take no shit. Ever.” Another shared smile as they walked together, past the Italian restaurant with the chalk sign out front and a street musician playing slide guitar. Maddy paused to fish around in her purse, dropping a fifty into the guitar player’s hat. He couldn’t have been more than twenty, and he stopped strumming to eyeball both the tip and her, and recognizing her from TV, he let out a whoop.
“Thank you, Miss Maddy! Thank you!”
“I like musicians. Keep playing, dove.” She winked at him, her practiced smile plastered to her face. She caught Darren studying her, his eyes narrowed like she was an experiment in a petri dish. She tilted her head, was about to ask him if everything was all right, when she heard the bang.
It was loud and startling. Just like it had been last time.
Warm wetness splattered across her face and neck. Just like it had the last time.
There was chaos and yelling. Just like there’d been the last time.
Maddy’s world went black.
“It’s four o’clock,” her mother’s voice rang out. “I’m in the middle of—ow!”
“I’ll get him.” Maddy pushed herself up from the piano and popped her knuckles. Her hands were tired—Rachmaninoff was murder, but Professor Geller insisted she was ready for his preludes. G-minor op. 23, no. 5 had become her Everest, but three hours a day on the keys and she was getting closer and closer to where she felt she ought to be. The concert was in two weeks.
She was almost there.
“Make sure he’s taken his medicine. Check his trash barrel to be sure he didn’t throw them away?” Mama called out. “He hasn’t asked for the keys to the bathroom so I know he hasn’t flushed them down the toilet.”
“I will! Where’s the dog?”
“Locked downstairs.”
“Good.”
The last thing any of them needed was a sedated chocolate lab, but that’s what they’d get if they didn’t watch Daddy with Lucy. He’d feed the pills to the dog, the dog would sleep for a day and a half, and the vet would have to come to the house for a fourth time to check her vitals. Dad wasn’t trying to be a bad pet owner. He loved the dog, but he hated the medicine that much. It made him feel dull and lusterless, he said. The problem was, off of it he was in pain. He’d cry. He’d shake. He’d hyperventilate until he collapsed, sometimes bashing his head on a sink or a bureau or whatever hard thing happened to be nearby when his body finally gave out.
It’d been that way for a year and a half, since the nervous breakdown no one would call a nervous breakdown. “Emotional exhaustion,” “severe anxiety and depression,” and a few other choice diagnoses were offered by doctors from Harvard and Columbia and Princeton, but Maddy knew what it all meant. Her father, the man who’d built a computer empire because he had a brilliant brain, whose company had far too many zeroes attached to its annual net, had snapped. They’d tried hospitals, but he’d hated them and begged to come home, swearing that there was nothing they could do for him in an institution that private doctors and nurses couldn’t do for him in the comfort of his own home.
They’d believed him, and in believing him, had accepted some of the responsibility for his care.
It wasn’t fun, but Maddy’s father was a good man. He was smart and shamelessly nerdy with his silver-rimmed glasses, bow ties, twill, and suspenders. He used to program games for Maddy to play when she was growing up—games that were fun and clever and would never, ever be played by any other little girl in the world. He took her to Disney World twice a year and they did a tour of the country’s best museums during her summers off from school. He loved the Smithsonian in particular and would conduct his own walking tours, tailoring his educational spiels to whatever age Maddy happened to be at the time.
He was a good husband, too, loyal and loving. Her mother adored him, which was why she was willing to put her career on hiatus when he got sick. Lenore Roussoux was a lauded biochemist, her vast pool of knowledge a boon to Stanford’s cancer research programs. But with Howard’s decline, she’d stepped away from the lab and had taken on advisory roles that allowed her to work part-time from home.
Howe’s four o’clock medicine check happened to coincide with her rare office time. Maddy wasn’t going to take her away from that.
She climbed the stairs, hoping Daddy was having one of his good days. Sometimes hearing her on the piano soothed him, and he’d make a request for when she went back to the keys. It was never classical he wanted, but jazz—Thelonious Monk, Herbie Hancock, Bill Evans. Maddy far preferred playing the old standards anyway, so she’d indulge him in hopes of lulling him into one of his rare, restful sleeps.
The Rachmaninoff wasn’t particularly calming, she knew, but maybe she could sneak in some Joplin before going back to rehearsal.
Maddy shuffled barefoot down the hall, her ponytail swishing with every step, the end long enough it brushed the small of her back. She knocked on her father’s study door and it swung wide to reveal his disheveled living space: books stacked on the coffee table and by the leather chair beside the fire; papers on his desk that ought to be filed; empty seltzer water cans shoved into the corner next to his laptop. Everything was in proper Daddy order, except there was no Daddy. She heard a noise down the hall and craned her head only to see her father’s day nurse, Maria, carrying his laundry
bag down the hallway.
“He’s in the bedroom,” Maria said with a smile.
“Asleep?”
“I’m not sure. He took his medicine twenty minutes ago, though. I watched him.”
“That doesn’t mean much. Mom found the pills in a potted plant the other day. He tucks them into his cheek and waits. I’ll check on him.”
Maria sighed and nodded. Maddy did much the same, their exhaustion a mutual, unspoken wavelength. Maddy passed four closed doors to get to the master bedroom, slowing only slightly when she heard her father’s groans from inside the room. They were low and deep, like a pained animal, and she cocked her head to the side as she approached.
“Dad?”
She heard him suck in a deep, shuddering breath. “Go downstairs, Maddy.”
“Are you okay?” She turned the knob on his door. They’d had to take out most of the locks on his floor so he couldn’t huddle in the dark by himself. It opened, but only a little, because he’d blocked off the doorway with a piece of furniture. “Daddy. Move the book case.”
“Go downstairs, Madeline. I’ll be okay.”
There was something about his tone that suggested he’d be anything but okay. It was too flat, too emotionless, and Maddy called for Maria, her voice cracking as she started throwing her weight at the door to rock the book case forward. The silence from the hall suggested Maria was already well on her way to the laundry room.
“Dad, let me in, okay? Please? I want to check on you and I can’t from out here.”
“I said go downstairs, Madeline. I love you, honey.”
She wasn’t going downstairs, not then, not ever. Not when he was in there by himself, not when he sounded like someone had vacuumed all the joy from his body. She didn’t know how he’d moved the book case so quietly that Maria hadn’t heard, but he’d managed it, and it was her job to unmanage it. She was only 130 pounds, but she was fit, and she was smart, and she wedged her leg into the gap between door and book case and shoved with all her might. The book case teetered, then reared back to its original position. She heard a click inside the room, but it didn’t register what it was because she was too busy breaking in. She yelled for the nurse and her mother, panicked, her voice echoing through the San Jose mansion. Another shove with her foot and the book case crashed down, spilling its contents all over the floor.
The door swung wide, just in time for the gunshot to echo through the house, the spray of gray matter to splash the front of her body, and the screams to start.
FOUR
DARREN HAD BEEN shot, but Maddy was the one who hit the pavement. She’d gone gray first, her eyes rolling up in her head before she collapsed. Under normal circumstances, he would have tried to catch her, to comfort her, to help her, but he was so stunned at the red blossom spreading across his shirt, at the horrible, burning pain ricocheting through his arm, that all he could do was watch her fall.
I’ve been shot. Someone shot me.
Behind him, there was a ruckus. He turned his head, his hand instinctively pressing against the fresh, oozing wound, and he saw a heavy black man wrestling a skinny white teenager to the pavement not ten feet away.
“Off-duty police officer, off-duty police officer!” the black man shouted, pinning the stranger to the ground, his hand smacking the gun from the kid’s hand. Darren stared at the two of them stupidly, his body hurting, his mind racing.
What’s happening?
Do I know that guy?
“How badly are you hurt, sir? You, there. Call 911!” The officer was talking to him, and then to a gawking, crying woman huddled nearby. Darren’s brain wouldn’t cooperate enough to let him answer the question. He couldn’t get over the thrumming heat in his upper arm or the blood staining his fingers. He looked down at Maddy’s dark head, at the curve of her body, and idly wondered if the red he saw spattered on her pale skin was his or hers.
“Darren? Darren!”
He lifted his head, nauseated.
I’m going to hurl.
Deep breaths. Deep breaths.
He heard his name again. It took a moment for him to register Alex barreling his way down the sidewalk. Others cowered off to the side, fearful of more violence, but Alex pressed on, ready to do the right thing. Ready to help no matter the danger because that’s the kind of guy he was.
“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. Sit down,” Alex said. “Please.”
“Hey, man. I think I was shot,” Darren rasped. “Maddy might be hurt, too.”
Alex immediately pressed his hand to Darren’s wound, fingers slicking over with blood as he guided Darren to a bistro chair outside the Italian restaurant. He fussed over him, looking from the front of the wound and behind, to his back. Nearby, sirens whined.
“You’ll be okay. It’s through the arm, clean through. You’re okay. Keep pressure on it, as much as you can. I’m going to check on Maddy.”
“Thanks. I . . . thanks,” Darren managed.
Alex knelt by Maddy’s side and was gently checking her for injury when the first police car pulled up to the curb. A cop climbed out, aiming his gun at the teenager with the off-duty police officer sprawled out on top of him. Shouting, clatter, chaos—everything blurred in Darren’s head, not because of blood loss or physical trauma, but because of the sheer senselessness of it all. A kid he’d never met in his life, whom he’d never seen before, had walked up behind him and put a bullet in him.
Why?
What did I do?
He couldn’t think, and luckily, no one made him. A few minutes later someone guided him onto a stretcher and into an ambulance, and after a short trip he was wheeled into the hospital. What followed was chaos: doctors coming and going; poking and prodding; X-rays. Eventually the doctor told Darren he really had gotten lucky: the bullet had gone wide and passed through the soft tissue of his bicep, not bone, which meant a bandage and some painkillers, but no surgery. He’d have to get regular checkups and preventative antibiotics in case of infection, but considering that he’d been shot, he’d gotten off light.
His sister always said that when things went to shit, he had a knack for sailing over the manure to land in the rosebushes. He guessed she was right.
Hours later, he was waiting to be discharged, his arm in a sling, when Alex showed up in the exam room with a couple of chopped-ham-and-pickle sandwiches from the hotel restaurant. They were Darren’s favorite, and Alex sat in the plastic chair in the corner of the room, removing the sandwiches and folding down the butcher paper so Darren could eat them one-handed. His left arm would be useless awhile, but he was a righty so it wasn’t all bad.
Darren smiled. “Hey, man. Thanks.”
“No problem. How are you feeling?”
“Not bad. The drugs help. Is Maddy okay? She went down hard.”
Alex’s blond brows knit together as he pulled out a salad and poured oil over it. That was it—no vinegar, no flavor—just lettuce, carrots, cucumber, some lean chicken, and oil. “She wasn’t shot, if that’s what you’re asking. Her father committed suicide a little over ten years ago. In front of her. The similarities were too much.”
Darren’s fingers tightened around his food. “Oh damn. I had no idea.”
Alex crunched on the first bite of his salad. “She’s good folks. Over the top, but she’s a product of her circumstances, I think. The extravagance and the tragedy intersect in funny ways.”
“I’d say I understand, but I don’t,” Darren admitted. “Though I suppose it’s none of my business.”
“It’s not much of a secret. Google her.” Alex wiped his mouth with a napkin. “She was so rich growing up they isolated her because they didn’t want her taken advantage of. Her best friend was her piano. She’s something of a virtuoso—or was. She was going to school for music when her father killed himself. Sadly, it did her mother in, too. She’s not dead, but she’s been in a facility e
ver since. Maddy left school after that. Somebody had to be around to keep the family afloat.”
Darren frowned. “You’d never know any of it. She smiles so easily.”
“She does more now than when I first met her. She was still in her ‘see it all, do it all’ phase back then, when she was with my brother. If they’d stayed together, I doubt either of them would have seen forty. Too much coke and champagne. Too much extravagance. But then our father died, and Sol collapsed, and Maddy couldn’t handle another broken person in her life. I don’t believe in divorce, but in her case I . . .” Alex shrugged his shoulders. “I understand it. I think she was afraid she’d be the next one to go down.”
“ ‘When the bough breaks’ and all that, yeah.” Darren used his teeth to further unwrap his sandwich. “Where is she now?”
“Asleep at the hotel. Maddy’s personal assistant will let Najmah know if she needs anything. Maddy woke up right as they were carting you off to the hospital—said she’d get a flight to Galveston tomorrow and head out for her ship. The familiar turf will help.”
Darren bit into his sandwich, troubled that his tragedy had inadvertently become Maddy’s, too. Sure, he’d just met her, but they’d had a lot of fun in their shared hours. If nothing else, he had a zillion dad jokes in the archives she would have appreciated.
“I should send her a card,” Darren said. “Or flowers.”
“I can give you her number if you’d like to text her?”
“Sure. Yeah, that’s great.”
Before anything else was said, a knock on the door sounded, and in walked a short, steel-haired sergeant he’d talked to earlier in the day. Sergeant Lopez was easily a full foot and a half shorter than him, but the expression on her face and the way she carried herself said she was a seasoned officer who could and would mess him up if the need arose.
The Queen of Dauphine Street Page 3
